


molasses

by vvelna



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Body Horror, Dan dies at the beginning but don't worry it's not permanent, Death by Bowling Ball, M/M, Minor Injuries, References to sex/genitals, Supernatural Elements, general what the fuckery, mainly plushie body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 15:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14358534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvelna/pseuds/vvelna
Summary: Home at last after finishing the Interactive Introverts tour, Phil accidentally kills Dan and he comes back to life in the body of a pastel plushie.





	1. Phil Kills Dan (But He's Alright)

It started with a bowling ball. Some friends had bought it as a “congratulations on completing your tour” present. The front of the ball was printed with an unflattering image of their faces and the words “FURRY NIPPLES LEAGUE.” It was a tour joke. You had to be there.

They’d been on tour from April to mid-September, and had only been home for a few days.

The plan had been to move out before they left to start the tour. But the deal on a potential house had fallen through at the last minute, and they’d had to scramble to extend their lease instead. Phil had been beyond stressed over the amount of money they were going to waste paying rent on a vacant apartment for months. Subletting or renting out the place as an Airbnb hadn’t seemed like a good idea, even if their landlord would allow it. There hadn’t been time to come up with a better solution. The forever home would have to wait.

Dan had been nearly at the bottom of the stairs. Phil had leaned over the railing, holding the bowling ball, to say something to him (he wouldn’t remember what), and somehow it had slipped out of his hands, falling to hit Dan on the back of his downturned head.

Later, Phil would only remember the sequence of events that happened next in a vague, detached way, like he was trying to visualize a story told to him by someone else rather than something he had experienced. Stumbling down the stairs. Feeling futilely for a pulse, a breath, a heartbeat. Considering calling 999 but deciding against it because he could see it was too late. Dragging Dan to the room where he filmed AmazingPhil videos…

His clearer memory of the events skipped from seeing the ball fall and make contact, to looking down at Dan’s body after heaving it onto the bed, onto those infamous green and blue squares. He placed a pillow over Dan’s head so he wouldn’t have to look at it.

Then there was a blank space in his memory.

The next thing he remembered was sitting against the wall facing the side of the bed. He was aware of another presence in the room—something in a corner maybe. Then something slipped out from under the pillow over Dan’s head.

It looked like translucent stream of water, rising upward against gravity, twisting and spiraling lazily. Running through its center was a glowing thread, pulsing with subtle colors: pale blue, then a golden white, a soft rose, and back to blue. This ribbon of light and fluid swam through the air, over toward the bureau. Its tail end slid out from under the pillow, and with sudden speed, it rocketed into the pastel Dan plushie sitting there, hitting its face and passing through it effortlessly. In a matter of seconds it had disappeared.

Phil got to his feet uncertainly, wobbling as he made his way to the bureau. He picked up the plushie and carried it out of the room. His brain was foggy, his thoughts drifting. The edges of his vision were obscured by an oily blur and his body felt strangely light. As he climbed the stairs he could barely feel his feet touching them. He headed toward the upstairs lounge.

Looking in the small mirror hanging in the lounge, he touched the center of his face delicately. Where his nose used to be, it was completely flat. The only evidence that a nose had ever been there were two slits where his nostrils had been. He looked like, well, you know who.

He was vaguely aware that quite a bit of time must have passed, as it had been around one in the afternoon when it all started, and now it was dark. He turned on a light.

He shuffled to the sofa and placed the plushie gently against one of the arm rests. Then he laid down with his head beside it and fell asleep.

*

Dan came to.

He was on the sofa. Maybe. He couldn’t see his body, where it should have been spread out before him. Instead, Dan saw Phil, his head close, his legs bent and pulled up by his chest. Apparently he was asleep…

Where the fuck was Phil’s nose?

Dan was either dreaming or having some kind of out-of-body experience. He couldn’t move his head to look around. If he had a body, it was paralyzed.

Everything was quiet. Oppressively silent. He couldn’t feel his body. But as he sat there for a few minutes he started to feel a painful prickling in his extremities. With the return of feeling he was able to move his head. He looked down. He didn’t understand what he was seeing. Little blue…legs? Little shoes…? He gave them a wiggle.

The pastel plushie. He was a pastel plushie.

Definitely a dream. Or he’d been drugged.

He attempted to move more but it wasn’t easy. Although he could feel his body there was some kind of disconnect between his brain and his limbs. (Did he have brain? He had to have a brain, right?) He tried to stand but couldn’t keep his balance, and the next thing he knew he had toppled off the sofa onto the floor. He winced and managed to get back up into a sitting position.

Phil stirred and lifted his head, squinting and frowning. His eyes were red from sleeping in his contacts.

Dan was sitting up and staring at him. Dan the plushie—but he knew it was Dan. There was something about the eyes. They didn’t look like his own, but the flat embroidery had been replaced with a depth and gloss that while not exactly human, was still suggestive of life and awareness.

Phil sat up hurriedly and slid off the sofa to sit in front of Dan on the floor. Then he launched into an explanation, riddled with apologies, of everything that had happened from the moment he dropped the bowling ball (or at least everything he could remember). He had a feeling it sounded like the plot of a very bad B-horror movie, the kind he and Dan might watch even though it sucked, because even utter garbage was fun to watch together.

Surprisingly, Dan didn’t interrupt him once during the telling. The only reason Phil knew he was listening was the subtle movements of his head—drawing back in shock or disbelief, titling in confusion.

He started to repeat himself. He decided it was time to shut up.

“So…that’s everything. I guess.”

Dan just stared. Phil had a sudden realization.

“Oh no, you can’t speak, can you?”

Dan shook his head and then lost his balance and fell over. Although his expression didn’t really change, Phil was sure he could see the frustration radiating out of his giant unblinking eyes.

Phil helped him get back into a sitting position, then tried to think of a way to fix the situation. His head was clearer, free of the haziness from before.

“Oh! I’ve got it!”

He bounded out of the room, leaving Dan behind, and returned a few second later with a black sharpie in his hand.

“Hold still, ok? I’m gonna draw you a mouth.”

Phil held Dan’s head as gently as he could and drew a slightly crooked pair of lips onto his face.

“Well, it’s not perfect…but it’ll do.”

To his amazement, Dan pulled the corners of his new lips down into a frown.

“Oh my god! I did it!” Phil cried, his face breaking into a genuine smile.

Dan continued to frown. He still couldn’t speak. Phil quickly realized this and sprang up again.

“One second, Dan…”

He came back with a pair of scissors.

“I just need to make an opening, and maybe then it will work…”

Dan shook his head in horror and tried to scoot away across the floor.

“I’m sorry, Dan. I don’t know how else to do it.”

Dan weighed the options in his head. Never speak again, or let Phil, hands already shaking, cut a hole in his face. He wondered if Phil could’ve just drawn his mouth open in the first place, and maybe he would have been able to talk. Probably now he was just going to spill stuffing everywhere. Would he even be able to talk without a tongue anyway?

Not being able to talk didn’t sound that terrible, though his chances of being killed by Phil (again) would probably be higher if he couldn’t tell Phil what not to do.

But could he even die anymore? He wanted to make a joke about being deprived of the sweet release of death, but he couldn’t speak.

Fine. He met Phil’s worried eyes with his own as best he could and nodded.

Phil reached slowly toward Dan, opening the scissors. His hands were shaking so much that before he could even get them near him, he accidentally ran his thumb over one of the blades and cut it.

“Shit!”

He stuck his thumb in his mouth before the blood could drip onto the floor—or worse, Dan.

The cut wasn’t deep but he still got up to get a plaster, just to avoid smearing blood on Dan’s face, which seemed disrespectful since it probably wouldn’t wash out without leaving a stain.

Meanwhile Dan sat on the floor, slightly concerned but also kind of wishing he could’ve just stayed dead, for fuck’s sake.

Phil returned with his finger bandaged and a renewed resolve. His hands were no longer shaking (well, not as much). He knelt down on the floor and carefully placed a hand behind Dan’s head.

Then he had second thoughts.

“I really don’t want to do this, Dan. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Dan tried to point to his mouth to indicate that Phil should go ahead, but he wasn’t sure if Phil could tell that’s what he was doing.

He could.

“Are you sure?”

Dan nodded.

Phil felt awful. He decided he would try to make it as quick as possible by attempting to cut Dan’s mouth open in one snip. He pinched and squeezed the fabric to make the section he was going to cut protrude.

Dan braced himself, and before Phil could lose his nerve, he pressed the tips of the scissor blades into the corners of the mouth he had drawn and brought them quickly back together.

He’d done it. Dan immediately passed out.

He came around shortly. The first thing he was aware of was Phil’s voice.

“…Dan, Dan! Are you ok? Dan, wake up. I’m sorry! Dan—”

Dan opened his mouth and said his first words.

“Thub ub.”

He was trying to say “shut up” but hadn’t got the hang of it yet.

Phil’s face lit up.

“You’re alive!”

Dan moved his mouth around a bit to see how it felt. A bit sore but honestly it didn’t really hurt that much. Also…what was that in his mouth? He stuck it out.

“Oh my god! You have a tongue!”

Dan tried to look down at it but couldn’t really see.

“Dan your tongue looks like a cloud. It’s a fluffy cloud tongue.”

“Is it my stubfing?” Dan asked. He was still had a bit of a lisp, but he was getting there.

“I guess so. Imagine what else you could grow if we let a little bit more of your stuffing out.”

“Shut up.”

That time the words came out clearly.

“I wonder if you can still taste? You can feel stuff right, with your hands?”

“Yeah, I can feel. Dunno about taste, but—”

He was interrupted by Phil suddenly poking him in the center of his face.

“Did you feel that?”

“Yes, I felt it! I just told you I could feel!”

“Sorry,” said Phil, trying to suppress a giggle.

“I was going to say, I don’t know if I can taste because I can’t smell. No nose, you know.”

“I could try to poke you some nostrils, and you might regain the ability.”

“I’m gonna pass for now, thanks.”

“Are you sure? We could both look like Voldemort together.”

It was a tempting offer but right then there were more pressing issues.

“Could you maybe draw me some eyelids? Like above my eyes? It feels really weird not being able to blink.”

Phil drew some eyelids on Dan.

“You look a bit like a muppet. One of the ones with eyelids.”

Dan didn’t care how he looked because he could blink. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them Phil was twirling the sharpie around in his hands.

“How about I give you some eyebrows too?”

“Yes. Please. Eyebrows are so important.”

He drew them on carefully, trying to capture the shape of Dan’s actual eyebrows. Dan wiggled them around.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to draw on a nose too? Even just for aesthetic?”

“No, that’s alright.”

“I could make it a little cat nose…give you some whiskers...”

“This is all just a fucking joke to you, isn’t it?” Dan snapped.

Phil’s smile faded and his voice went quiet.

“Of course not. I’m just—I don’t know what to do. I just want to make it better.”

What he didn’t say was that he was terrified that it was all just an incredibly bizarre lucid dream, and any minute he would wake up and Dan would still be dead, lying at the bottom of the stairs, and all because Phil was the clumsiest—and possibly worst—person in the world.

Dan sighed. He wasn’t really angry. Just tired and overwhelmed.

“Phil, I think I’d like to just go to sleep. Can you take me to the bed?”

Phil nodded and scooped Dan up with both hands, even though he could easily have held him in one. To avoid dropping him (because he was deathly afraid he would), he held him against his chest.

“Feel like a guinea pig,” Dan mumbled.

He suddenly found it difficult to keep his new eyelids open.

“You’re a Danny pig. Sorry, that sounds bad. A guinea Dan? Gan?”

“S’all good. When I die again you can put me in the guinea pig…”

And then he fell asleep.

Phil carried Dan to their bedroom. He felt sick going passed the stairs where Dan had died. He looked down noticed that they were clean. Had he done that? He couldn’t remember. He felt nauseated. Everything’s ok, he told himself. Dan’s ok. Somehow, he had brought Dan back to life. And if he could do that, he could probably restore Dan to his human body again, eventually. Or at least a human body. Even if it wasn’t the original. That was still in the AmazingPhil room, where he had dragged it…

If he didn’t stop thinking about it, he really would throw up.

*

By the time Dan woke up, it was midafternoon the next day.

Phil sat with his laptop in the lounge and tried to do some research on what had happened. His endless google searches weren’t turning up much. He searched for things like “back from the dead” and “body swap” and even “my boyfriend is a plushie” (which turned up a surprising amount of results, but most of them seemed to be about whether it was okay for a man to own stuffed animals). He heard Dan calling from the bedroom, went to get him, and brought him to sit beside him on the sofa.

They sat in silence for a few moments before Dan spoke.

“If I’ve got no ears, how come I can hear our voices?”

Phil closed his laptop.

“I don’t know. That’s so strange.”

“You know…I can’t hear anything else. When we’re not speaking, everything’s silent.”

He didn’t like it. He didn’t want Phil to stop talking.

“Maybe it’s some kind of telepathy. Like…a mind-meld.”

Dan snorted.

“Maybe. How about you poke some holes so I can hear something other than our annoying voices.”

It took a bit of convincing to get Phil to do it, but Dan got him to acquiesce by saying it would probably feel just like when he got his ears pierced.

It hurt a quite a bit more than that when Phil pressed a pushpin into the side of his head. But Dan didn’t say anything and tried to keep from wincing. He didn’t want Phil to freak out and refuse to make the other ear.

“Alright,” said Phil, when it was done. “I’m going to shut up now, and we’ll see if you can hear other stuff.”

At first it was still completely silent. Then the sound flooded back in, like he’d taken off a pair of high quality noise-cancelling headphones.

He could hear the sound of traffic outside, of voices and a distant siren, the muffled cooing of pigeons out on the balcony, the friction of Phil’s hands as he anxiously clasped and rubbed them together.

“It worked!”

*

It took Dan several hours to learn how to walk without his outsize head making him tumble over. Phil found this very amusing and also didn’t mind having to carry Dan around everywhere. Dan was not as happy about the situation.

“This is fucking terrifying. I’m too high up and you’re gonna drop me!”

“I would never drop you,” Phil replied, tightening his grip around Dan’s waist.

“Now you’re gonna squeeze me to death! What is wrong with you?”

“Shhhhhh. It’s fine. I don’t think you have any internal organs.”

“I’m going to kill you.”  
  
“Sure.”

One thing he would never be able to do was take the stairs by himself. Phil refused to let him even try. He was too superstitious about the fact that Dan had died on the stairs. Besides, he argued, even if Dan could manage to haul himself up and down them with his stubby arms and legs, it would be incredibly physically taxing.

“This isn’t yoga, Dan. It’s climbing Everest.”

All things considered, they were adjusting relatively quickly. But they both had a feeling the peace wouldn’t last for long. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> velvetnautilus on tumblr if you want to swing by and say hi


	2. Phil (and Dan) Make a Video

A little under a week had passed since Dan died. 

Things kept ending up in places Phil was sure he hadn’t put them. He didn’t ask Dan about it, or even mention it. They were always things that were too big for Dan to have moved. He just returned them to their rightful places. Shoes, boxes of cereal, plates and bowls, books. The one that freaked him out most of all was Dan’s laptop ending up sitting in the empty bathtub, open, with Dan’s last main channel video paused on the screen.

*

They’d been able to put off going to any meetings with management because they were still recuperating from the tour. 

“We need some time to recharge,” Phil had said over the phone. “Especially Dan.”

At least Dan could dictate texts and tweets to Phil. And he could still talk on the phone. Otherwise friends and family would’ve started to worry.

*

Dan thought Phil should make a video.

“We haven’t made any content since the tour ended, and the last month of it we only made a couple of Instagram stories. The masses are going rabid, Phil. D’you know how many theories about us falling out with each and quitting YouTube I’ve read on Twitter? I’ve even seen some dodgy creepshots of guys who barely look like me on Instagram, with captions like ‘Dan Howell spotted with a date in Milton Keynes,’ and then the comments are full of people trying to figure out the identity of whatever poor person the dude’s with.”

“You spend way too much time lurking around our fans’ social media. Just let them think whatever they want.”

“Says the guy who checks out the YouTube page of everyone who comments on our videos.”

“That’s different. YouTube comments are a direct line of communication from the people to us.”

“Never mind. We haven’t uploaded anything since the tour. Not even a gaming video. And we can’t exactly film one of those. Nobody’s gonna bat an eye over me going M.I.A. from my channel. But we need to give them something. Your quirky tweets aren’t gonna satiate the beast forever.”

Phil resisted the urge to tell Dan he had pronounced “satiate” wrong.

“I did tweet a photo of us yesterday. It was from weeks ago, but you can’t tell where it was taken. That might help dispel some of the rumors and put people at ease.”

“They always know when pics are old, Phil. They’ll figure out when it was taken by the fucking angle and intensity of the sunlight or the length of our hair.”

“But what am I going to make a video about? I can’t remember any of the ideas I had saved in my mind palace.”

“Storytime: I Killed My Best Friend.”

“Ouch, Dan. Too soon.”

“Just do one of those sleepless night videos, or a look at all this useless junk I bought video, or a watch me take Buzzfeed quizzes for ten minutes and then plug my merch video, or—”

“You’ve made your point.”

Then Phil remembered the biggest stumbling block of all.

“Dan.”

“What?”

“I can’t film in my room.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t been in there since you…since you came back. That’s where it happened. On the bed.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know. I—that’s not even the worst part,” he said, and covered his face with his hands. “I left your body in there too.”

Dan was speechless.

“I’m sorry, Dan. Once you were in the plushie, I just left and closed it all up behind me. It was awful. I couldn’t deal with it.”

“Phil…if my body’s in that room, wouldn’t we be able to, you know…smell it?”

Phil shuddered.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it disappeared. Maybe it became something else. Please, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

He kept hidden behind his hands.

“Just film it in the downstairs lounge then. Like you did with the clothes video.”

“Won’t that be weird though? People will wonder why I’m not in my room.”

“Just make up an excuse. It doesn’t even have to be believable. People get suspicious no matter what we do. But no video is worse, right?”

There was another issue.

“What about my nose? Maybe I should create some kind of prosthesis?”

“You know any nose you tried to make would just look shit.”

“Hey! Well it wouldn’t matter what it looked like if I just got the basic shape right, and then I could just wear scarves over it…or do this,” he said, pulling his shirt up over his nose and mouth.

“Because that won’t look odd at all.”

“Cozy though.”

Earlier, Phil had found some groucho glasses in the bottom of his props trunk. He had separated the nose from the glasses and mustache, punched holes in either side and slid a piece of string through so he could tie it around his head. Of course he couldn’t use it for videos, because it was a hunk of plastic that looked nothing like his nose, but for going outside it created the shape of a nose underneath a scarf. 

Phil wondered why it had to be his nose. Why couldn’t he have lost a toe or something? Even an ear would have been easier to hide. 

Phil decided to go ahead and make a video. Phil thought about wearing the fake nose, or some other kind of disguise, but he figured that would be too suspicious. He’d just fix his face in editing later. Yeah. That would totally work. Dan didn’t say anything when Phil told him his plan, just cocked an eyebrow and sucked in his lips. 

He was brainstorming what the video should be about when he got an idea.

“Dan! I just had a great idea for my video. You can be in it too.”

“Phil.” 

Dan gestured at his face and body.

“You won’t be on camera. Just your voice. Like the not-milk and cheese challenge. You still sound just like you. Everyone will think you’re really there. And they’ll stop saying you’ve run off to Australia with one of your seven secret lovers.”

Dan nodded slowly. 

“That’s…that’s actually a really good idea, Phil.”

“Thank you. I didn’t win that Creator of the Year award for nothing.”

*

Phil kind of wanted to do a Viewers Pick My Outfits part 2, but obviously he didn’t have any viewer selected outfits ready to go. He decided on “Wearing Dan’s Clothes,” which was a bit of a weak concept for an entire video, but it would definitely provide a healthy dose of fan service to a good chunk of their audience. The best thing to do would be to have Dan also put on Phil’s clothes, but obviously that was impossible. Phil would just plug that at the end—thumbs up if you want Dan to wear my clothes next! It wasn’t going to be a groundbreaking video, but Phil supposed groundbreaking wasn’t exactly what people had come to expect from his channel. Lighthearted entertainment? Yes. Life-changing ideas and contemplation? Probably not.

The filming went pretty well. They were a bit rusty but it was easy to fall back into their old patterns of interaction.

“Dan’s sick and looks pretty gross, so he won’t be coming on camera,” Phil explained at the beginning of the video.

“Wow, Phil. You look so much cooler now,” said Dan when Phil tried on the first outfit.

Phil wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to hearing Dan’s voice emanating out of a plushie smaller than a chihuahua. He kept half expecting to look over past the camera and see the real Dan, the one he had to look slightly up at when they stood close, instead of this one he was always looking down at.

When the filming was done, he got to work right away on the editing. Then he showed the finished product to Dan.

Phil had attempted to superimpose images of his nose over his face in the video. It wasn’t very convincing.

“No offense, Phil, but this is kinda shit. Really letting that Master’s degree down.”

“You’re the one who said I needed to make a video!”

It would have to do.

*

The response was mostly positive. To some people it was scraping the bottom of the barrel, to others it was the best thing that had ever happened. Most opinions seemed to lie somewhere in the middle.

Phil scrolled through the replies to his tweet linking the video. 

“Why does your nose look weird?” one read. 

“wtf happened to ur face,” read another. 

“The simulation is malfunctioning,” he typed in reply to the first one.

He could have just ignored it—he had a lot of practice doing that—but there were a lot of replies about his nose and he thought making a joke about it might make it look less like a thing he was trying to hide.

There would be conspiracy theories. There always were. But he was pretty sure none of them were going to come anywhere close to the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha it’s a good thing the real dan and phil didn’t make a video where they wore each other’s clothes right before I posted this


	3. Dan is Frustrated and Phil is Frankenstein

They sat on the sofa, watching TV. Dan was atop a pile of pillows so that he could rest his head on Phil’s shoulder.

“Phil. Do me a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Cut fingers into my hands.”

Phil jerked his head away from the screen to look at Dan, almost sending him toppling off the pillows.

“Dan, come on. You don’t really want me to butcher your hands.”

“You cut a mouth into my face, but you’re chickening out of this? I want fingers Phil, these things are fucking mittens. I can’t pick anything up.”

He flapped his fingerless hands around.

“What if it doesn’t work? Your hands might become even more useless.”

“I’m sure it’ll work. Everything else has so far. You’ve got the magic touch, Phil. I mean, fucking hell, you literally brought me back from the dead. I think you can handle manifesting a few fingers.”

Phil grinned impishly and said, “I think you mean _hand-le_.”

“When I get my fingers I’m gonna strangle you.”

“You won’t even be able to wrap them around my wrist let alone my neck.”

“Whatever, you’ll do it, right?”

Phil was still unsure. Dan had been okay after he cut his face to make the mouth, but making fingers would require a lot more cuts. He didn’t want Dan to suffer. Being trapped in the body of a plushie was surely suffering enough without being further maimed by Phil’s clumsy hands.

But Dan had sounded almost like he was pleading. Behind the nonchalant front he was putting on, Phil sensed desperation.

And it was Phil’s fault this had happened. All of it. If Dan wanted fingers, he would give him some goddamn fingers.

But he wasn’t going to cut Dan ever again.

“Wait here, Dan. I’m gonna give you fingers, but I need to go buy something first.”

Phil strapped on his fake nose, wrapped a scarf over it, and headed out. It wasn’t exactly cold enough in London to warrant bundling up with a scarf around his face, but the alternatives were wearing the plastic nose out in the open or just going nose-less so it seemed like the best option.

Dan hated being alone in the apartment. It was such an overwhelmingly vast space now that he was so small. He tried to focus on the television while he waited, but even the screen was so large, the faces on it almost monstrous.

Twenty minutes later, Phil returned. It felt to Dan like he’d been gone for hours.

“Pipe cleaners!” he said, pulling them out of a shopping bag.

He cut them into little plushie-sized fingers and poked the sharp ends into Dan’s hands.

They both looked down at the finished product, waiting.

Thirty seconds. Dan wiggled his new fingers and bent them. They both cheered.

Just then, Phil saw something out of the corner of his eye.

“Did you see that?”

“See what?” said Dan, without looking up.

He was trying out a variety of hand gestures with his new fingers.

“Something just ran across the floor into the kitchen…”

Phil got up to look but there was nothing there. Did they have mice? Were they doomed to always have mice no matter where they went? But something about the way whatever it was had moved told him it wasn’t a mouse. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything.

*

When they woke up the next morning, Phil’s arm felt a bit sore. He held his glasses up to his face to look at it. There were four long scratches down the outside of his upper arm. They weren’t very deep, but they were red and inflamed.

“You must have done it in your sleep,” said Dan.

“I guess...” said Phil, looking down at his short fingernails.

“Or I did it with my pipe cleaners.”

Phil sincerely doubted Dan had crawled over his body to get to his arm, scratched him, and then crawled back over to the other side of the bed, all in his sleep. But he didn’t want to dwell on it.

Dan closed his eyes and dozed off again, while Phil got out of bed. When he woke back up some time later, he could hear the drone of the shower coming from the en suite bathroom. Then it stopped, and in a few minutes Phil walked out, just an annoyingly thin towel wrapped tightly around his waist.

He ruffled his wet hair and walked over to where the hairdryer usually was, ready to be plugged into a power strip on the floor, but then remembered he’d left it in the bathroom the other day.

When he came back into the bedroom, hair dryer in hand, Dan was sitting up on the bed watching him, mouth twisted in a frown.

“Do you have to walk around like that?”

“Like what?”

“Practically naked.”

Phil frowned and furrowed his brows low over his eyes.

“Since when do you care about that?”

“Since I became a dickless doll you only touch when you have to carry me around like a little dog. Especially when you’re waltzing around all the time being a fucking tease.”

“Oh.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and thought for a moment.

“Sorry, Dan. I wish I could help you out but I really really really _really_ do not want to have sex with you when you look like that. It would be like…fucking a teddy bear.”

Not to mention the logistics. Phil could not imagine any possible scenario that would do anything for Dan.

What he didn’t say was that sometimes looking at Dan in his current form made his skin crawl. Hearing Dan’s voice come out of the grotesque mouth he had given him was decidedly unsexy.

“A teddy bear? So what? You’re a fucking furry anyway. I don’t see what the issue is—”

“Oh my god, Dan. Please shut up. I’m begging you.”

“Maybe you’d prefer to sew some cat ears on my head? Whip out the sharpie and whisk me up like you wanted to? Would that get you going, Phil?”

Phil ignored him. He thought for a second.

“Couldn’t you just, you know, help yourself out?”

“I don’t have a penis anymore, you turnip.”

“Oh yeah. We should have thought about that when we were designing the plushies.”

“You think you’re so funny.”

“How can you even be horny when you don’t have any of the equipment? I don’t get how any of this works.”

“I dunno Phil, how can I breathe without lungs? How can I think without a brain? How is any of this possible? It’s not.”

“This is going to sound weird, but hear me out…”

“Oh, god.”

“I made you fingers, right? They were a bit rough, but I could probably figure out a way to give you a…a…well, a plushie…dick.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I mean! Just for you to use! I’m not gonna do anything creepy, I swear.”

Dan rested his face in his hands for a moment.

“You clearly have some kind of twisted plushie fetish, Phil, but I’m not going to shame you. I’ll consider your suggestion. Right now I think I’d rather watch porn and then cry myself back to sleep.”

Not that he produced tears anymore.

“Whatever you need.”

 


	4. Phil Makes a Penis

The next day, Phil tried to make a penis.

He had a bunch of reference images pulled up on his laptop. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen pictures of penises, or penises in the round before, but it felt very strange to be looking at them for the purposes of creating a likeness. He, of course, also had his own memories of what Dan looked like. But translating all of that into a miniature penis for a plushie was a bit challenging. And absurd, especially considering the size it was going to be.

He’d looked up all kinds of sculpting techniques online. The fingers he’d fashioned for Dan had been fine, but they were a bit inelegant. He wanted to do this as best he could. If this worked out, he and Dan could probably resurrect DanandPhilCrafts for a very special episode. Potato Penises. Glitter Dicks. Square Balls. Because he wasn’t going to forget those. Oh no—if he was going to make Dan a new set of genitals he wasn’t going to half-ass it and leave out the balls.

Earlier in the afternoon he had gone to a craft store to gather materials for the method he had chosen—felting. There he was faced with a dizzying array of yarns and fibers in various colors. One of the tutorials he’d read online had suggested using wool roving or batting. Even after watching at least ten YouTube videos on the subject, he still didn’t really understand what that meant. He searched awkwardly up and down the aisle until on a bottom shelf he found a row of bundles with “wool batting” on their labels.

He then had to decide which color to go with. The most logical choice would be to pick whichever color of wool matched closest to the plushie’s fabric. There were some neutral beige tones, and some white, but he wasn’t sure that any of them really matched. Or he could go wild and make Dan a penis out of bright emerald green or pitch black wool. There was a pale blue wool and a baby pink that he could combine to really reinforce the pastel aesthetics. Dan would kill him.

He ended up grabbing one of the light beige ones. He felt so strange carrying it in his arms. As if everyone in the store who passed by could tell he’d never bought wool in his entire life and didn’t have a clue what he was doing. How were you supposed to hold a little bundle of wool? One-handed? Two-handed? Under the arm? Like a baby? Like a rugby ball? Not to mention the scarf over his face probably made him look like he was about to run out of the shop without paying.

He then tried to find a felting needle among a wall of sewing and knitting and crocheting and who-knows-what needles, but it was like looking for a needle in a needle stack. It hurt his eyes to look at all the shiny silver ones, squinting to try and detect their differences. He stood there for what felt like an eternity before an employee appeared and took pity on him, asking him if he needed help. He located the felting needles immediately on a spot on the wall where Phil had definitely looked at least five times.

The last thing he needed was a block of foam, which thankfully he was able to find himself without too much trouble. Finding his way to the check-out presented more of a problem. He felt like he kept passing the same aisles again and again, like he was trapped in some hedge maze where instead of hedges there were displays of beads and fake flowers and craft kits for kids, with names like Build Your Own Racecar and Paint Your Own Unicorn (complete with three colors of glitter for embellishment. He’d have to come back for that one sometime).

Finally he managed to stumble upon the tills. He queued and when it was his turn he suddenly felt incredibly self-conscious, like the elderly woman ringing up his items could tell what he was planning to do with them. He kept his eyes down, shoulders hunched, and was glad he had a scarf covering half his face.

After they ate dinner, he pulled out his laptop, laid out his materials, and got to work. Dan was banished from the kitchen while he was in there crafting. Phil only took a break to help Dan into bed later in the evening so he could go to sleep.

Considering the size of what he was making, it shouldn’t have taken so much time. But trying to work with something so soft and delicate wasn’t easy for someone as heavy-handed and shaky-fingered as Phil. He kept messing up and starting all over. He wanted it to be as good as it could be.

By the time he was finished, dawn was breaking outside. He had three plasters on his fingers from stabbing himself with the needle. He fell asleep for a few hours, head on the kitchen table.

*

“Wow, Phil. You actually made me penis. And a little ball sack. This is either the creepiest or the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

They sat on the bed and Phil bashfully unveiled his handiwork to Dan. He tried not to think about how much it looked like a little worm with tumors.

“Well, let’s get these dungarees off, huh?”

Phil helped him pull them off. He couldn’t meet Dan’s eyes and his cheeks were hot. This didn’t escape Dan’s notice.

“You stayed up all night crafting me a penis, but now you’re being coy?” said Dan.

Technically, Dan was now undressed from the waist down. There was nothing alluring about a naked plushie to Phil, but he wondered if being naked in front of someone felt the same when you were a plushie as when you were human.

“I really don’t understand how this works,” said Dan. “The plushies don’t have skin under their clothes. Their clothes aren’t detachable from their bodies—they _are_ their bodies.”

Phil shrugged.   
“I gave you a mouth with sharpie. And eyelids. Nothing makes sense anymore, Dan. We’ve transcended reality.”

“Speaking of sharpie, could you give me some nipples? And a bellybutton? I think that would make me feel more human.”

“You’re still human, Dan. But yeah, of course. I can nipple you up.”

Phil lifted Dan’s shirt and drew three dots on his torso in the proper locations. He got a quizzical look on his face.

“D’you reckon they’ll become like real nipples? And you’ll have sensation?”

“Coming round to the idea of plushie sex, are we?”

Phil laughed and shook his head.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Your loss, mate.”

They both laughed and looked at the penis again.

“Ok, but how are you gonna attach it to my body?” asked Dan.

“Oh. I hadn’t really thought about that.”

They brainstormed for a bit and came to the conclusion that either gluing or sewing it on would be the best option. Dan voted sewing. Phil said glue.

“Dan, imagine how painful it would be for me to sew it on. I don’t even know how to sew properly.”

“If you glue it on, it probably won’t stay. Not unless you use hot glue, but if you’re trying to help me avoid too much pain, that’s not the best idea.”

“It doesn’t have to be hot glue. They make special glue for sticking fabric together. I’ve seen it.”

“…Fine. Glue it is.”

Dan didn’t exactly relish the idea of Phil clumsily trying to sew a penis on him anyway.

“I’ll go buy some right now,” said Phil, hurrying out of the room.

“You sure?” Dan called after him, “You look like you could use a rest.”

“I’m fine. Be back soon.”

*

When Phil returned with the glue, they moved to the kitchen.

Phil tried to hold the penis gently but he hadn’t made it very sturdy in the first place, and as he tried to get it in the right spot, it became more and more misshapen until it no longer resembled genitalia at all, but just a loose bit of felt.

“Phil…I don’t think this is going to work…”

“No, it’s fine! Just let me make another one. I’ll do it right this time…” his face was flushed and his throat felt tight.

“Phil, it’s ok. You don’t have to.”

Phil wasn’t sure why, but tears were running down his face.

“I’m sorry. I really tried. I really _really_ tried.”

“I know you did. Really, Phil. I’m not mad. It doesn’t matter. Who needs a penis anyway?”

Phil buried his head in his arms on the table. He couldn’t stop crying.

“Man, you really miss my dick that much, huh?” Dan said softly.

He heard a weak, muffled laugh. Phil sat up and wiped his eyes. He sniffed and let out a shaky breath.

“I think I need to go lie down and sleep. For a week.”

 


	5. Dan Undergoes a Transformation

The next morning, minutes after waking up, they lay side by side on the bed, looking up at the ceiling and having meandering, inane conversations interspersed with moments of comfortable silence.

“Phil….I don’t have a nose. So how did I breathe before you gave me a mouth? And how come I can still breathe when my mouth is closed?”

Phil pondered for a minute, lips pursed and brow furrowed.

“It must be like frogs. They can breathe through their skin.”

“I’m a frog?”

“You kind of looked like one before…big mouth.”

“Oi.”

“Or maybe you don’t really have to breathe, like you don’t have to eat?”

“But I still breathe anyway. I can feel it.”

Phil shrugged.

Then he turned his head to look at Dan and asked, with his best straight face, “Are frog people still scalies, or is that only a reptile thing?”

The conversation fell apart from there. Dan wasn’t sure he bought Phil’s breathing through the skin explanation. Sometimes he wondered if Phil knew more about the situation than he was letting on. Other times he felt that Phil was just as confused and lost as he was.

They drifted onto the topic of how exactly Dan was alive.

“Maybe it was through the power of love. Like Harry Potter. Uh, Lily, right? She saves Harry from dying with love?”

“She didn’t drop a bowling ball on his head though.”

Phil winced.

“And no offense, but you’re not exactly a wizard.”

“I could be…I mean, clearly something magical has happened here. You can’t be skeptical about that.”

Dan really wanted to be skeptical about it, but that was a little difficult considering his current situation.

“Has anything like this ever happened to you before? And I don’t mean like, some random coincidence you’ve assigned supernatural significance to, but like…something so unexplainable?”

“I don’t know…not like this…”

There was something though, something more about the situation. He could feel it, a little flame burning in the back of his mind. But he couldn’t see it. There was heat but no light. It was like intuition almost, picking up cues that triggered emotional reactions before even knowing why. And the feelings…they weren’t good ones. They were telling him to turn back.

“No, nothing like this. I’ve never known anyone who died and then came back as something else. Honestly Dan, I think maybe it wasn’t really me who did that part. It can’t have been.”

He reached out absentmindedly to twirl one of Dan’s curls around his finger.

Wait.

“Oh my god, Dan! Your hair! Your hair is hair!”

“Wow, Phil, Really great observation there.”

“No, I mean it’s not just fabric anymore. It’s real hair, Dan. Your hair. Growing out of your head.”

He pulled a strand of the hair down over Dan’s face so he could see it.

“Holy shit. What the fuck? When did that happen?”

“Overnight, I guess?”

“I grew a full head of hair overnight?”

“Well, it’s not a very big head.”

They spent at least ten minutes marveling over Dan’s new hair. Phil carried him over to the full-length mirror so he could see himself properly.

“Bit uncanny valley, isn’t it?” said Dan. “Imagine if we had sold the plushies with human hair sewn onto them.”

Phil stuck out his tongue.

“Gross.”

“Do you think this means other things will change? Like other parts of me?”

“I hope so. I mean, wouldn’t that be a huge improvement?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t say huge. Not if I’m still this size.”

Phil sat on the floor and put Dan down in front of his crossed legs. He looked at their reflections in the mirror and hunched forward, propping his head on his hand.

“But maybe you’d look more like a real person. A tiny person. Might be sexy, you know, macrophilia—”

“If my hands weren’t marshmallows, I’d punch you right now.”

*

Over the next few nights, more of Dan’s features transformed. His fabric became skin. (“I think your dimples are coming back!” said Phil, poking his cheeks.) His pipe cleaner fingers became flesh and bone with the tiniest fingernails. The crude mouth Phil had given him morphed into lips with a pink tongue behind them. Phil’s favorite change was when Dan’s eyes returned. Now he could look him in the eyes and feel a sense of familiarity, and truly feel that it was Dan looking back at him.

The visual of Dan having human eyes and lips on his still quite flat plushie face was a little disturbing though.

“You look a bit like that fruit, you know…what was it? An orange?”

“You did _not_ just compare me to the Annoying Orange.”

The next thing to return was Dan’s nose. Even though Phil had never drawn him one, he woke up one morning with a miniature version of his own nose growing out of his face.

“I can’t believe you’ve got a nose now and I don’t,” said Phil, running a fingertip up and down it.

“Stop, that tickles,” said Dan, scrunching it up.

Phil drew his hand away and then something incredible happened. Dan sneezed.

“Dan!” said Phil, clapping his hands as a huge smile spread across Dan’s face.

Nipples, bellybutton, toes—everything was mutating. The more of Dan’s features became human, the more Phil thought he kind of looked like one of those gross “if the Powerpuff Girls were real” drawings. But he was also very happy for Dan, so he didn’t mention it.

“Just waiting on my penis to pop out like my nose.”


	6. Dan Disappears

Phil woke up gagging and gasping for air. He reached over for Dan but his hand just touched an empty bed. He couldn’t see anything.

He fumbled for his glasses on the nightstand, or the control for the lights that should have been there. His hand knocked against something and he heard it shatter on the floor. His heart was racing.

He wanted to call out but he couldn’t speak. He felt like he was choking, like something was lodged in his throat.

He jumped out of bed into the darkness, immediately tripping and banging his elbow on the nightstand. His knee hit the ground and he felt a sharp pain and something wet seeping into the fabric of his pajamas.

He was able to stagger blindly to the wall and flip one of the light switches. Once the darkness was no longer enveloping him, his heartbeat began to slow and breathing became easier.

He had knocked a glass of water onto the floor, and cut his knee on the glass. It wasn’t bleeding too badly—his pants were wet from the water. He sat on the floor and rolled up a pant leg. Just a few cuts and some little bits of glass. He pulled them out carefully and then got up to look around the room.

Of course, he still couldn’t really see. He walked gingerly to the nightstand, giving a wide berth to the area right in front of it where the glass had fallen, and picked up his glasses to hold in front of his eyes.

Dan wasn’t on the bed. He wasn’t anywhere in the room, as far as Phil could tell.

He put in his contacts. Then he looked all over the apartment, getting more worried as he went from room to room. He kept calling Dan’s name, but got no response.

He was starting to feel frantic when he remembered there was one place he hadn’t looked. The room they hadn’t been in since Dan died.

He walked down the hall to it, heart thudding in his chest when he saw that the door was slightly ajar.

He opened it slowly, as slowly as possible, body clenched for whatever was about to happen, and walked in.

Dan’s body was gone. Nothing but bloodstains on the duvet to ever suggest it had been there.

He stood dumbfounded, looking down at it. Then he saw something move out of the corner of his eye.

It was the bowling ball, rolling out of the corner of the room. He hadn’t seen it since the incident, hadn’t even thought about it and where it could have been all that time.

It stopped moving and Phil approached it warily. He moved it gently with his foot. Nothing happened.

He got down on the floor to look at it more closely. His eyes might have been playing tricks on him, but he thought he saw something….something moving inside it, through the holes….

Phil brought his face closer to the holes and a tiny, long-fingered white hand reached out and swiped the air right in front of his face.

He yelped and fell backward, catching himself with an arm thrown out behind him. He scooted backward on his butt until his back hit the wall by the door. A creature climbed out of the hole, its body expanding as it did. It was like a little white goblin, skeletally thin, with beady black eyes and long limbs that ended in bony fingers and toes with sharp claws.

Phil was frozen.  
  
The creature scurried across the floor and leapt onto the bed. Then it began to change. Its limbs elongated, its head expanded, its facial features morphed and its whole body grew taller and wider. The bone white skin darkened, hair grew out of its head. Soon it looked completely different.

It looked exactly like Dan. It smiled, mouth stretching as wide as it could.

Phil just stared, mouth hanging slightly open.

When the creature spoke, its voice was Dan’s.

“Hi, Phil. Good to see you. Bet you missed this face. But don’t worry, everything’s fine now. I’ll sit blathering in front of a camera, looking just like Dan, and nobody will suspect a thing. I’ll even make some videos with you, if you’re a good boy.”

“Who…who are…”

“Who am I? I’m the one who fixes your mistakes, Phil. You didn’t think you were the one who transferred Dan’s soul, did you?”

Everything was shattering in Phil’s head. He couldn’t feel his body. He was barely aware of having a body. All he could see was Dan sitting on the bed in front of him. Their eyes were locked and he couldn’t tear away his gaze.

“….Why?”

“You asked me too. ‘ _Please help Dan_ ,” it mimicked in a high-pitched, whiny voice.

“But...I don’t remember any of it.”

“You never do. I took your nose too.”

“Why my nose?”

Dan shrugged—no, the creature wearing Dan’s body shrugged.

“Why not?”

Some of the feeling was returning to Phil’s body. Sirens were still going off in his head, but he was able to get to his feet.

“Honestly, Phil, I think you’ll soon find that I make a much better companion. I think we’ll get along just fine.”

It was freaking him out how exactly the creature looked like Dan—down to every detail he could see—the freckles on his face, the dimples, the shape of his eyebrows, the width of his shoulders, length of his legs…he couldn’t stop staring.

The creature met his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

“We could even fuck, if you want.”

“Fuck off.”

It laughed with its whole body, eyes closed, leaning back. The body language was painfully familiar.

“Wow, Phil. So rude. When did you become such an ill-mannered person? I’m just messing with you.”

Phil took a step away from the door.

“Where’s Dan?”

“What do you mean?” it said, doe-eyed. “I’m right here.”

Phil took another step toward the bed. He could feel his hands shaking and he balled them into fists.

“Where’s Dan?”

“This is Dan. Well, his body at least. You really fucked it up, but I’ve made it all nice and new and shiny.”

It flashed a smile and fluttered its eyelashes.

“If you’re asking about the little gremlin with Dan’s soul, he’s in the _mi-cro-wave_ , taking a little nap and—”

Phil had never run faster in his life. He had never been more sure-footed, flying out of the room and up the stairs to the kitchen without a single misstep.

It was empty. There was nothing in the microwave.

He turned around, panting, and the creature was behind him, leaning against the doorframe with its arms crossed.

“You are so easy to fuck with, Phil. It’s pretty amusing.”

It turned around and leant down to pick up something behind it. It held up a large glass jar.

Inside the jar was something Phil recognized immediately—something translucent and glowing.

“I’ve got Dan’s soul safe and sound right here. As for that ugly abomination of a vessel it was housed in—I got rid of that.”

It smiled and tapped its fingers on the glass.

“So, what’s for breakfast?”

 

 


	7. Phil Fraternizes with the Enemy

It went about like it owned the place. Eating all the food in the kitchen (did it count as stealing Dan’s cereal if it was putting it in Dan’s body?). Taking five hour baths and watching TV into the night—laughing Dan’s laugh, throwing popcorn at the screen—popcorn that Phil had to make. Because Phil had to do everything it asked. The creature had control over both Dan’s body and his soul.

It even insisted on sleeping in their bed. Phil slept out in the lounge.

“You’re welcome to join me in here.”

Phil would rather sleep outside than anywhere near it.

*

The jar with Dan’s soul was never out of the creature’s sight. It carried it everywhere, under its arm, and sat with it in its lap or by its side. Its eyes were rarely on the jar, but Phil got the impression that if he so much as moved a hand in its general direction he might lose that hand.

The creature brought the jar into the bedroom when it went to sleep. If sleeping was actually something it did—Phil had yet to see it. Either way he didn’t think he’d be able to sneak into the bedroom to snatch the jar.

*

The creature told him things. Interspersed between bad jokes and insults, it told him things with a little more substance. Phil did his best to listen attentively while pretending not to care. The creature told him that Dan’s soul had started to influence his vessel—causing it to mutate—which was rare, but not unheard of.

“It certainly helped that his vessel was an effigy of his original body. There would have to be some kind of outside influence too, though. An encouraging force.”

But he never would’ve become fully himself again. There were limits to what, in its words, “a weak and ineffectual human soul can accomplish.”

The creature said much less about itself. Where it came from, what it was. What the limits of its powers were. Why it had appeared. It kept hinting that they had met before, but Phil couldn’t imagine when that might have been.

*

About a week after the creature had taken over, Phil woke up to a surprise. His nose was back on his face.

Phil went to look for the creature, and found it in the AmazingPhil room, sitting on the foot of the bed and sorting through a bunch of Phil’s belongings it had apparently emptied out of the bureau.

“Why is my nose back?”

It didn’t bother looking up at him.

“You’ve been very obedient. And you’re a little less ugly with a nose on your face. Makes it easier to look at you.”

Phil walked over to the bed and sat tentatively on it, as far from the creature as he could be. He had an idea, but he wasn’t sure it was good one.

Only one way to find out.

“What else can you do? Like, are there limits to where you can put souls or who you can become?”

The creature snorted.

“Limits? Please, Philip. I can move anybody anywhere. And I can move my own soul about even more easily.”

It examined a pack of playing cards, and tore a few in half.

“That’s amazing.”

“Don’t flatter me. But you’re right. It is.”

Phil closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He clenched his hands into tight fists and then opened them. When he spoke, he tried to keep his voice as light as possible.

“Can you show me?”

The creature looked at him for the first time since he’d walked into the room. It smiled, and then Phil felt a searing pain in his chest that began to shoot throughout his body. It wasn’t a hot pain, more like an extreme cold, like water from the artic had been injected directly into his heart and was now getting pumped through his bloodstream. He couldn’t breathe. His vision went black and he was vaguely aware of his body falling sideways onto the bed, before awareness abandoned him completely.

When he came to he was in the plastic guinea pig. He couldn’t tell at first. He could see but he couldn’t move. His body was too stiff and solid. By swiveling his eyes to see what was surrounding him, he realized which object he had to be in. Also the fact of having eyes was a clue that he wasn’t, for instance, a plant. He was positioned in a way that allowed him to see the bed clearly without having to move his head.

His body was there, lying on its back, face slack but serene, hands folded over its chest like a corpse in a casket.

The creature was sitting next to it, up near the head of the bed, with a wide gleeful smile.

“Welcome back, Phil!”

Its voice was bubbly and warm and Phil found the sudden absence of malice unnerving. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t open his mouth.

The creature clapped its hands.

“This is great right? Now you get to experience what your buddy went through for yourself. Although if I had the option to pick a vessel, I’d go with a plushie over a hunk of plastic. Shorter adjustment period.”

It yawned dramatically, arms stretched over its head. Was it just going to leave him there? Was that it?

“I didn’t tell you this part before, but if I wanted to, I could seal your soul in there forever. Then I could throw you in a fire and let you melt down, or strap some explosives to you and blow you to smithereens. And you’d be gone for good. Once the soul is trapped, if you obliterate the vessel, you obliterate the soul.”

Phil concentrated as hard as he could on trying to move, but he couldn’t budge.

The creature stretched again and got off the bed. It bit the skin on the back of Dan’s hand, hard enough to draw blood. With a finger on the other hand, it drew three sigils on the bureau, in front of Phil. He looked down at them and couldn’t recognize what they were or if he had ever seen anything like them before.

“And now, the final step to seal your soul into this cute little doorstop, is for me to say your name. The full name that you accept in your soul as your true name. I’m pretty sure I know it. Would you like me to say it?”

He still couldn’t move. Its face contorted into a painfully stretched grin. It opened its mouth as if to speak, but instead of words, it began to cackle.

“I’m just fucking with you, Phil. God, you’re so easy to fuck with. I’m not going to seal you up in there. You’d be no fun like that.”

It wiped the sigils away, and the next thing Phil knew, the pain he’d felt when the creature had transferred his soul into the guinea pig returned. He blacked out and came to in his body, lying on the bed. The creature was sitting cross-legged facing him, elbows on knees, chin propped on clasped hands.

Phil’s head was pounding. It felt like his brain was being held in a fist. There was an enormous feeling of pressure, then a release, and then pressure again. He felt a bit nauseated too, like when he was suffering from motion sickness. The walls and everything around him, including the creature (smiling sweetly and watching him), seemed to be undulating and blurring like mirages caused by heat rising off a road. His stomach lurched and he squeezed his eyes shut.

“You’ll be fine in a minute. Just lie here until your soul’s sitting comfortably in your body again.”

The creature hopped over him off the bed, and headed for the door.

“That was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?”

It turned around and stepped back to the bed, bent down, and kissed Phil on the forehead. Then it laughed again and skipped out of the room, slamming the door behind it, sending pulses of pain through his skull.

*

  
The creature was always hungry. Phil had to give it whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted. Even if that meant running out to fetch ingredients multiple times day, or getting takeaway from three different restaurants delivered in the same hour, or hitting up convenience stores at 3 a.m.

Meanwhile, Phil barely had time to eat. Or sleep. He was always being shaken awake, poked and prodded and wheedled at. The only concession the creature made was allowing him to take a shower every day, undisturbed. How he spent the rest of his time was determined by the creature’s whims.

They spent a lot of time watching TV. It laughed to the point of hysterics at everything—reality shows, cooking shows, gritty dramas. Tears ran down its cheeks and spit flew from its mouth. It slapped its knees and the sofa and sometimes Phil’s leg, guffawing and shrieking.

Phil didn’t focus on the screen. He didn’t listen to the music or the voices. He didn’t hear the creature when it turned to him, its spittle hitting his face, to make some comment or ask a question. It never waited for a reply anyway.

He traced the sigils again and again on the arm of the sofa.

He traced them into the marmalade on his toast with a knife, then swiped them away.

He wrote them over and over through droplets of water on the shower walls each morning. When he closed his eyes he could see them—written in Dan’s blood on the bureau.

*

One morning while delivering a plate heaped with a dozen fried eggs to the creature, he casually asked it a question.

“What’s your name, anyway? It feels weird not having anything to call you.”

It yanked the plate out of his hands, nearly sending half the eggs sliding off onto the floor.

“My name is none of your business. But if you really want to know it, we’d have to swap.”

“Swap?”

“My soul in your body. Your soul in here. Or anywhere. I could put you in this,” it said, waving the TV remote.

“What does that have to do with your name?”

“A body remembers the name of every soul that inhabits it.”

The creature looked down at the eggs and then without warning, flipped them up into Phil’s face.

“Those look disgusting. You can’t even fry an egg right? I’ve done so many favors for you, Phil. And you never reciprocate.”

He wiped a bit of egg off his face. He smiled.

“I’ll go make you some more.”

 

 


	8. Phil Makes His Move

Phil and the creature were back in Phil’s filming room.

Phil had taught the creature how to set up lighting and operate a camera. It had recently decided that it wanted to film a video for Dan’s main channel.

“How hilarious would that be? I’ve seen some of his videos—and yours—and none of them make any sense to me. My video will probably get more views than anything you idiots have ever produced.”

It stood in front of the camera, peering into the lens. Phil sat behind it on the bed. Dan’s soul floated gently in its jar on the bureau.

“You could get a different vessel and start your own channel, you know. I bet you could make it the most subscribed-to channel.”

“Or I could just alter this one’s appearance, but I’d rather make use of what little fame your friend has. It’ll be more amusing that way when I completely destroy his reputation one video at a time.”

“Well, you’re not going to film in here, right? I think it’d be better if you filmed in Dan’s usual spot.”

“I’ll film wherever I like.”

*

Phil had barely slept the night before. In the morning, he had stood in the shower, running the water as cold as he could stand it. When he couldn’t bear it anymore, he got out and sat naked on the floor, shivering. He drew the sigils with his finger in the puddles around him.

*

“What are you going to make a video about?”

The creature examined the lights. It stuck its face very close to one of the hot bulbs and licked it.

“I haven’t decided. I’ll just start recording and let my brilliance guide me. Maybe I’ll strip naked and write some offensive human slur on my chest. Maybe I’ll make you sit here and I’ll shave your head and eat the hair. Maybe I’ll move my soul around—hop from one vessel to the next and back again. His viewers will eat that up, right? Stupid people love special effects.”

Phil balled up some of his duvet in his hands, then let it go and smoothed it out.

“I like the last idea. Can you tell me more about your soul?”

The creature turned to look at Phil, smiling with its hands on its hips.

“My soul is much stronger than yours. And Dan’s. You can see his—incorporeal, no solid presence at all. But my soul has physicality. I could strangle you with it. My soul is very impressive.”

Its voice was dripping with pride and condescension. Phil swallowed and looked it square in the eye.

“Will you show it to me?”

His pulse was speeding up. He clasped his hands together and tried to keep them from shaking.

The creature wiggled its eyebrows.

“I saw yours, so now I have to show you mine?”

“You said it was impressive. I just want to see for myself.”

It smirked and then sighed dramatically.

“Fiiine. I’ll show you. But you better brace yourself. I don’t think your tiny human brain is prepared to witness my beauty.”

The creature’s soul shot out of Dan’s mouth. Unlike the ribbon of water and light that Dan had expelled, this took the form of a thick rope that seemed to be made of human hair. It had an awful, unwashed scent, with undertones of singed hair and vomit.

It snaked through the air over to where Phil sat, and circled around him lazily. The smell was so strong up close that Phil had to hold his breath. It wound into a tighter circle and dragged over his face. The hair was wet and oily, and he shuddered and gagged. Contradicting its fairly soft texture, when it moved across his face his skin burned like it had been rubbed with sandpaper.

Once the tail end had exited Dan’s mouth, his body crumpled to its knees and then fell sideways.   
The creature’s soul was still revolving around Phil. His eyes darted to the jar with Dan’s soul on the bureau. It was now or never.

Phil reached out and wrapped his hands tightly around a length of the creature’s soul. It tried to tug away but he gripped it firmly, pushing his fingers into the hair. He slid off the side of bed, to stand beside the bureau. The soul wrapped around his neck and began to constrict. He could feel the tightening strands of hair digging into his skin.

Phil bent his elbow and thrust it at the jar, sending it toppling off the bureau and onto the floor, where it smashed open.

Dan’s soul rippled upward out of the mess of glass and hung in the air, as if uncertain of where to go. The creature’s soul loosened its grip around Phil’s throat. It tugged powerfully enough against his grasp that he could no longer hold it. He tried, but it ripped out of his hands, abrading his palms as it went.

It headed straight for Dan’s body. Phil tried to grab onto it again to hold it back, but it moved too quickly.

Dan’s soul was quicker. It cut through the air like a bolt of lightning and disappeared into Dan’s mouth.

The creature’s soul seemed to vibrate with frustration. It turned away from Dan and flew back toward the bureau, disappearing inside the houseplant there. The stems began to sway and the leaves fluttered.

Without hesitation Phil grabbed a piece of the broken jar and sliced the back of his forearm. The sigils had become muscle memory. He didn’t even have to picture them in his mind.

He had to do it before the creature realized what was happening.

Roots shot out of the pot and wrapped around Phil’s wrists as he finished the third sigil. He looked over at Dan, who was sitting up with a dazed, blank look on his face.

“Dan! Its name! Say its name!”

Dan’s eyes widened as he looked off into the distance. His mouth fell open and from it he emitted a string of syllables Phil had never heard before.

The roots went limp. The leaves stopped moving. Phil reached out tentatively, plucked one off, and ground it up between his fingers. His breathing was labored and heavy.

Dan rose slowly from the floor, legs shaking. He made his way carefully to the end of the bed and sat down. Phil came around and stood a few feet in front of him, wringing his hands and chewing his lip.

“Dan…are you alright? How do you feel?”

Dan looked up at Phil and then down at his own hands resting on his thighs. His body felt large and unwieldy. The room felt claustrophobically small. He looked back up at Phil and tears started to run down his face.

“Your nose…your nose is back…”

His voice was quiet and hoarse. Phil laughed nervously.

“Yeah. So are you. You’re back. Back in your body, I mean.”

“I love your nose,” said Dan, standing up.

He couldn’t stop crying.

“I love your nose, too. And you.”

Phil stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Dan. And then he started crying too, because Dan felt so solid and warm and _real_.

 


	9. Epilogue

They burned the plant out on the upper balcony.

“Neighbor’s might complain,” Phil said quietly, as they watched the leaves and stems blacken and shrivel.

Dan bumped him with his shoulder.

“Guess we’ll have to move.”

*

They gave themselves a week to recover before filming a gaming video—the first post-tour. They compartmentalized, detached, and got to work. Later they would have to deal with everything that had happened over the last seven weeks—unravel it from the corners of their minds they were sequestering it in, examine it, process.

For now they had decided to keep moving forward. This was their career after all. And it was the life they had chosen—were still choosing. They wanted to get things back on track.

*

It was the last week of November. Phil had set up the camera on a tripod in the downstairs lounge. He’d insisted on throwing a new green and blue throw over the sofa for old time’s sake.

Dan was already sitting there, cross-legged, rolling a black sharpie between his palms, buzzing with the high, dizzy energy these videos still provoked in him after all these years.

“You ready?” said Phil.

“Ready.”

Phil pressed record and joined Dan on the sofa.

 

**Author's Note:**

> velvetnautilus on tumblr if you want to swing by and say hi


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